


And Shine

by ThunderAndMadness



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Canon Typical Violence, F/M, Finn POV, Finn is traumatized thats importabt, M/M, Multi, Poe becomes a player later, Rating may increase as fic progresses, Reconditioning, Starts out with Finn/Rey, Suicidal Thoughts, implied abuse (background), two OCs appear in this first chapter they are background characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 20:06:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7588249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThunderAndMadness/pseuds/ThunderAndMadness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a story the cadets used to whisper, back before they were full Stormtroopers. <br/><i> There's a man in a box. We don't know if he's sane or not. If he is sane, he'll kill himself when we open the box to interrogate him. If he's not, he'll try to kill us when we open the box to interrogate him. Until we open the box we won't know if he's decided to be dead or alive. </i><br/><i>-- Does that mean we can't open the box?</i><br/><i>We have to open the box. It's our orders. </i></p><p>Finn wakes up. His mind says, simultaneously, that he is a Stormtrooper and that he is not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Shine

**Author's Note:**

> This story deals with disordered thinking and suicidal thoughts. Much of Finn's thoughts are based on a lifetime of trauma. Please proceed with caution.  
>    
>  _You reached for the secret too soon. You cried for the moon. Shine on, you crazy diamond._

The first thing he recognizes is the steady drip of bacta in the IV bag. Must have banged himself up again, bad training accident. He can feel the tubes up his nose and in his arm. He's in the First Order medbay, he's sure of it.

FN-2187 doesn't open his eyes. He's found that blinding himself right when he wakes up in medbay isn't ever the best course of action. Instead, he takes a deep, slow breath, and listens.

The bacta in the IV to his right. That's close by. A little further, the steady high pitched hum of a machine, the pitch wavering slightly in rhythm with his heartbeat. He thinks he hears steady breathing on his right, and below it a slow, feeble heartbeat. He hears it skip a beat. The machine attached to that bed is humming at a lower frequency. 

Whoever the poor sod in the next bed is, they're dying.

If they're dying, this is a ward for the nearly-dead. The beyond-care. If FN-2187 is here, the clean up crew will be taking his helmet and suit back so some other recruit can have it. Maybe it still has Slip's blood on it.

Slip.

The Battle of Endor.

Kylo Ren.

FN-2187 stops listening. He begins, instead, to do something dangerous. He starts thinking.

If Slip is dead and FN-2187 is here, then the battle is over. They lost. A lost battle will mean redoubled training, reduced rations, and reconditioning for those who had failed.

 _I guess I need reconditioning,_ he thinks. And at the same time, below the first thought: _my name is Finn._

At some point in time, many of the stormtroopers had learned to think two things at once. Fighting your own head. The rational mind says _free thought will get you killed in a fight._ The irrational mind whispers   _the shadows on the walls are monsters and the people around you have secret thoughts of their own._

Smooth it away. A good soldier has no irrational mind. FN-2187-- _Finn,_ he thinks again, below his unit number-- collects himself. The irrational mind is reconditioned by the rational one. The head fighting itself. Forgetting is an active act, a pruning of thought.

Finn fights himself. Eyes closed, deep breaths. Where before he had extended his hearing into the room, he now turns every sense inwards, the mind staring into itself.

Reconditioning is, in itself, not uncomfortable. It consists of a simple series of statements which confirm his identity. All else is stripped away. It takes effort and stealth to maintain anything which isn't part of your identity. You have to hide it from yourself. The mind scrapes away anything it can find that doesn't belong.

I am FN-2187. _I am Finn._

The leader of my platoon is FN-2000. _I don’t know where Zeroes is. Slip is dead. The man in the brown jacket shot him._

The leader of my squadron is Captain Phasma. _I disobeyed Captain Phasma's orders._

My primary skills are marksmanship, hostile-planet survival, and extraction of information from hostiles. _I stole a ship and freed a prisoner. Poe._

_Poe?_

\--The name shocks him so much that he cannot hide it from his rational mind. He forgets.--

 

My loyalty is to the First Order. _This is not the First Order._

My present location is the Penultimate Ward of the First Order's Stormtrooper Medbay. _I am somewhere else. Where am I?_

Finn exhales and feels the familiar hollow sensation at the base of his skull that tells him there was something he forgot.

He listens to the room again: nothing but him and the person dying slowly next to him.

Finn opens his eyes. The ceiling isn't a match for the First Order medbay.  The lighting is dimmer, and visible rafters crisscross the ceiling.

A machine next to him starts beeping wildly.

"He's awake!" Two sets of heavy footsteps pound into the room.

Finn turns his head to look at them and a searing pain goes through his back. He exhales sharply, whimpers. An unfamiliar doctor in stained scrubs looks down at him. Her neck is dappled with green scales. She says, "There you are, buddy."

He tries to say something back to her, but either he's been clenching his jaw this whole time or he's too shocked by being called _buddy_ to use his words. 

A little further away, another doctor is examining the machines by his bed. "His vitals are good, heart rate good, blood pressure a little low but probably fine."

Finn has absolutely no idea where he is. He tries to sit up.

His entire spine protests in a flash of sharp pain, but he stays sitting. He sees bright red and hears- somewhere nearby, above him- a woman scream. The snap-buzz smell of electricity is all over him. The hollow part of his skull where it meets his neck is _thrumming_. Something he forgot.

"Rey? Where's Rey?" Her name come backs to him.

"We'll fill you in a little later, ok? Let's try to stretch you first so you can sit up properly soon." And that's a kinder way of saying that he doesn't get to know what happened. He submits to the stretching. The doctor tests his limbs by moving them back and forth, stopping whenever he winces or cries out. His arms are fine.

His legs-- his legs are curled in, barely working. He can't feel anywhere below his knees. The doctor doesn't say anything about it. She takes hold of his leg and curls it upwards so he can see his knee in the corner of his vision. The pain in his lower back and hips is unbearable, but he can't even feel her fingers on his shin.

They're going to decommission him. There is no use for a Stormtrooper with no legs. This could be his last day alive, really.

He tries to ask a few more questions about Rey, his injury, the battle of Endor, but the doctor refuses to answer him.

"Save your questions for when you've had a little more rest. Your body's not used to all this mobility yet. We'll get you some food and you can relax a while. Then we'll talk."

This doesn't sound like the treatment a useless soldier gets. They're treating him like a patient who can be nursed back to health. As if his legs will somehow heal. Perhaps this is some sort of last ditch effort to salvage him, like a droid repaired with the bodies of other droids.

She nods to her assistant, who scurries out of the room and returns with a bowl of broth.

"Is this euthanasia?" He asks, because if this is the First Order they will tell him if he's a dead man.

"No! Of course it isn't," the assistant says. "Why would we euthanize you?"

He knows this isn't the First Order. No Order doctor would ever wonder why they would euthanize. It is the way of things: anything that no longer has a purpose ceases to be.

Still, he believes them. He accepts the broth and spoons it up carefully, moving as little as he can. He does this without thinking. Survival requires no thought.

And under his empty, hungry mind: he wonders about Rey.

A man comes to visit him. He has a quick smile and heavy lines in the corners of his eyes. Finn has a hard time looking at him with how much he moves his hands.

"Buddy!" Is the first thing he says. Finn is still surprised by it. He wonders if that's meant to be a name. He wonders what the purpose is, really, of a name. They designate no order, no sense of continuity between oneself and the others in one's platoon. He finds out that this man's name is Poe.

Something in the hollow part of his skull echoes.

Slip is dead and the man in the brown jacket killed him.

"You killed Slip," Finn says. "He was-- he was my friend."

"I know," Poe says, even though Finn suspects that he didn't know, didn't see people under the helmets until Finn took his off. "I'm sorry."

Finn doesn't forgive him, but it seems sincere.

"Where's Rey?" He doesn't remember everything but what he has fought to know, he _knows_ , and he knows that he cares about Rey. His friend.

"Saving the galaxy," Poe says. "She's....stars, I don't know what you know about the Jedi. Do you remember anything?"

The First Order teaches about the Jedi. The Jedi are dead. They were weak and they were purged. All the tricks a mind can play don't protect against a rifle. Lord Ren knows the Force and uses it well. Lord Ren is not weak, and that's why he has an army.

FN-2817 knew this from birth. The rational mind knows the truth.  
Finn isn't sure. He doesn't remember much about the Jedi, except that Rey is one, and if Rey is one they can't be all that weak.

So Finn shakes his head. "Rey is a Jedi, and they use the Force." It's all he can say for sure.

Poe says, "She's the last Jedi, and she's finding the other last Jedi. They're going to go do...mystic stuff together, I guess. I don't really understand the Force."

"Me neither," Finn says. "So where is she? Where's the other last Jedi?"

"She's traveling to a planet called Ahch-To. She thinks he's been in hiding all this time." Poe fiddles with his hands. "I think we could probably call her, if we wanted. General Organa does sometimes."

General Organa. The name brings to mind a face, echoed across propaganda posters throughout the galaxy. General Organa, leader of the resistance, Organa who had let her kingdom die. Her planet _burned_ because of her. She was weak.

And yet-- another face, older, a little harsher around the eyes than the posters and holovids he remembers. The woman who had greeted him when he arrived. _Brave_ he thinks, and then forgets he thought it.

"You remember the General," Poe says, and it's not a question. He sees it in Finn's face: the awe that trails General Organa wherever she goes. Poe studies him in silence a moment, watches the minute twitches around his mouth as he struggles with something in his head. "I'm sorry about your friend," Poe says, feeling as though he's putting gauze over a blaster wound. It's not enough.

Stormtroopers don't have brothers. They have no concept of family.  If Finn had known the word, he would have called Slip brother. As it is, he can think of him only as FN-2003, Slip, a good platoon leader. Mourning your dead is allowed, if it will make you fight better. Grief and vengeance are inseparable. 

"Thank you," Finn says, because he feels like he has to say something. Another rush of memory hits him: the jacket. "You...gave me your jacket, didn't you?"

Poe's face lights up. "Sure did! It looks better on you than it ever did on me, trust me."

Finn doesn't trust him. He takes this as a figure of speech. "I think it's ripped now. I took a..." The word takes a moment. He doesn't think of them as lightsabers, but as the tools of the Knights of Ren. "A lightsaber wound to the back. You know I can't walk?"

"I heard. You doing OK with it?" Poe looks genuinely concerned.

Strange, this tacit understanding that he's not going to be decommissioned.

“I’m OK.” It’s a lie, but he doesn’t want Poe to know how he feels. The right answer would be _I shouldn’t even be alive_ but he’s not telling this guy that.

Poe smiles. “Good. I’m glad you’re getting better.”  Finn is mesmerized for a second by the way the lines around his mouth and eyes deepen when he smiles. It’s such a disarming smile.

Finn isn't used to seeing so many faces. He's finding that he likes them a lot. It's hard not to stare at Poe and the doctors all the time. In the Order, the Stormtroopers take their masks off in the mess hall and the showers and to sleep, but they're discouraged from looking at each other. Eye contact suggests sexuality. Eye contact is intimacy. Finn spent his days looking down. It’s strange, to be allowed to look at people so freely.

When Poe leaves, Finn fights to remember him. The man in the brown jacket, who calls him buddy and killed Slip. Poe.   
He remembers some of what happened, without warning, in the middle of the night. He is lying awake, staring at the darkened ceiling and listening to the slowly failing heartbeat of whoever is in the bed beside him. It hits him all at once: memory, something he managed at some point to hide from the reconditioning process.

_Finn and Rey had just found the Resistance when they were attacked again._

__We led them right to us, _he thinks. It’s a ship full of Stormtroopers. He recognizes almost all of them. He spots FN-3016’s shaky gun hand almost the instant she raises it. She’s never been a friend of his, but he still knows her nickname._

_“Red?”_

_He has never looked directly at her face. He doesn’t know what her expression is under the helmet. But he sees her other hand begin to shake. He knows she recognizes him. It feels like she hesitates for an eon, but in reality it was probably only a few seconds._

_“Eight Seven,” she says, so softly that he almost can’t hear it over the blaster fire all around them. She acknowledges him._

_And then she shoots._

_He ducks and runs. He recognizes their tactical formation and has the urge to join it. An instinct, not primitive but mechanical, a function of the rational mind. It’s hard to fight the instinct to fall in, fit into his place in formation, the way it should be. Still, he fights it. His body moves without him. It grabs a blue lightsaber-- not his-- and swings. Swings again. It runs and twists._

_It nearly runs into Nines._

_He would have known Nines anywhere, in any disguise, by the way he always stands: left foot just a little bit forward, barely enough to be out of formation, toeing the edge of regulation. He recognizes Nines by his left foot and then by the blaster and shield he throws down immediately upon seeing Finn. Nines’ cortosis-weave Z6 Baton extends from his right gauntlet. He whips it over his head and spins it almost ceremoniously._

_“Traitor!” Nines roars. He rushes forward and swings. Finn’s body is going without him again, going blow for blow with Nines, lightsaber versus deadly Z6 Baton. He watches Nines’ body for even the slightest sign of remorse or affection. They had, at some point, been friends. But Nines is pushing him backwards, thrusting the Z6 Baton out towards him with intent to kill. Finn has seen him spar with this before, knows his fighting style, but Nines is still one of the finest melee fighters he’s ever dueled. Finn is almost a match for him. He nearly swings his lightsaber down into Nines’ chest, but it’s blocked by the Z6 Baton at the last second, held horizontal with all of Nines’ strength behind it, pushing him off._

_He goes flying. Lands on the ground. Nines rushes towards him, Z6 Baton held high. He brings it down with a force so great Finn thinks he hears his armor crack. Finn thrusts the lightsaber up. It crackles with an eerie buzz that sounds electric but carries no heat--_

_\-- and melts through Nines’ breastplate, the white plastoid melting and reshaping around flesh that opens and instantly burns shut as the lightsaber passes through it._

__Traitor. __

_Finn dimly recognizes that he just murdered his friend, his _friend._ FN-2199. Nines, who a moment ago lived and breathed and stood with his left foot forward, had hated Finn in his last few moments of life. Finn had betrayed him and then murdered him._

_He’s nothing but a half-melted body now. The body does not bleed; the wound had been instantly cauterized as it had been inflicted. He would be left when the platoon retreated. Stormtroopers do not bury their dead. Finn’s mind is whirling and for a split second he thinks he’s going to be sick, but then a more important realization pushes the bile back._

_Rey._

_Rey is gone. Finn gets up. Nines is dead and Rey is living. He saw Kylo Ren take her, carrying her like a child into the woods. He hopes they’re still there. Hope: a function of the irrational mind. The irrational mind knows only blind emotion, and Finn follows it now, towards where Rey must have disappeared._

__  
In his medbay bed, Finn turns over. Mixed with the antibacterial smell of the medbay is the scent of melting plastoid.

Slip is dead, and Nines called him a traitor before he died. Zeroes is probably still back home. The Order has probably already released holos calling him a traitor-- and in turn, the Stormtroopers have probably already taken that into their heads and forgotten him. The First Order does not tolerate dissent well.

Poe may have killed Slip, but Finn killed Nines. They're even. No-- Finn is twice the monster for killing Nines. A Stormtrooper does not attack his own. He does not desert. He does not run like a coward from the Order. 

Finn considers decommissioning himself. It is the way of things: anything that ceases to have purpose ceases to be. And what purpose does he have? A real Stormtrooper would die before leaving the Order. He could rip the breathing tubes out of his nose right now and choke to death. It would be the right thing to do. 

It is his irrational mind that saves him. Its messy, blind emotion. The rational mind forgets what it cannot use. The irrational mind preserves itself at all costs. Finn, like many before him, had learned very young how to think two things at once. 

Rey knows who he is. Poe knows who he is-- and Finn can't blame him, not when Finn has done the same. General Organa knows who he is.

He is being forced to live. The reflex-- mechanical, trained-- to decommission fights the instinct-- primal and strong-- to live at all costs. 

"Finn, he whispers aloud. "My name is Finn."   
\-------------------------------------  
There's a story the cadets used to whisper, back before they were full Stormtroopers. 

_There's a man in a box. We don't know if he's sane or not. If he is sane, he'll kill himself when we open the box to interrogate him. If he's not, he'll try to kill us when we open the box to interrogate him. Until we open the box we won't know if he's decided to be dead or alive._

_\-- Does that mean we can't open the box?_

_We have to open the box. It's our orders._  
At some point, the heartbeat in the bed beside him slows and stops. The silence wakes him up.

The doctor and her assistant cart the body out of the room. Finn is unbearably aware of the stench of death, even through the tubes in his nose.

He forgets the body. The reconditioning does its work.

There was never anyone in that bed. The rational mind erases the fear of the irrational one. He does not know what else he forgot.

The next time Poe comes to visit, Finn doesn't remember his name.

He barely remembers his own.

The rational mind forces out what it does not need. It is the way of things: anything that ceases to have a purpose ceases to be.

Poe's face falls. Finn is so fascinated by the movement of his cheeks, sagging out of a smile.

"I'm Poe," Poe tells him. "I'm your friend. I gave you my jacket."

Poe is the man in the brown jacket.

A wave of grief-- anger, if he's calling it by its right name-- for Slip washes over him.

"You'll get better, buddy," Poe says, mistaking his anger over Slip for despair about his condition. It's the wrong thing to say, but Finn believes him anyway. Anger means he's alive.

He wants to know the whole story-- what happened after Jakku-- but he's afraid he'll forget it.  
Poe brings General Organa along with him. The General is halfway between the images in First Order holovids and the paintings on the Resistance propaganda posters. She most resembles an image he vaguely recalls from his arrival-- which is to say, he supposes, she looks like herself. There’s a softness to her that he doesn’t think he’s ever seen in the holos or the posters. She bows her head to him in greeting. Like he’s an equal. Finn’s rational mind screams _enemy_.  
Finn knows that enemies are not respected. They are not saluted. Their tactics are not admired, not even in the privacy of the barracks. Still, her body language doesn’t seem mocking. The General seems….genuine. So Finn does something dangerous: he believes her. He raises his arm-- feeling the scar on his back stretch as he does so, like his body itself is telling him to stop-- and gives her a shaky salute.

General Organa says “You were very brave, fighting Kylo Ren.” Finn nods. This he remembers only in flashes-- the snow and the sharp buzz of Ren’s lightsaber.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he says. She’s looking right at him. He feels like a bantha in headlights. “Rey was braver.”

General Organa smiles. “Don’t discredit yourself, young man.” She pulls something from one of the endless pockets of her robe. It’s a small holoplayer, the handheld kind, like squadron leaders in the Order would use to receive communications. The General’s is scratched up. On the back of the durasteel case, in messy but firm lettering, is engraved LEIA. She holds it up to the light, taps the screen, and then looks at Finn again. “Rey attempts to call from wherever she is every third cycle. I thought you might like to talk to her.” 

Finn doesn’t really know the time system on this planet. “How long is that in Galactic Standard Time?”

The General shrugs and looks at Poe. “I’ve been using the local calendar for a while. Can you convert?”

“Uh….” Poe wrinkles his nose and tries to think it through. Finn watches his face contort in awe-- the expressions he’s capable of feel like they would be alien on Finn’s face. “Every Benduday. Five days is about equivalent to three cycles here.”

The General taps the holoplayer again. “Sometimes it doesn’t work very well, but we do our best. I think she should be patching in any minute now. She’ll be happy to see you!” 

Finn is happy to see her. He’s never had many friends. Rey appears on the screen, scratchy and out of focus, but beaming. He wonders how he must look to her, breathing tubes up his nose and his hair growing into a poof. 

“General, I--” She pauses and squints at the screen. “Finn?!”

He grins. She looks just how he remembers her. “Hey, Rey.” Her smile is so wide.

“How have you been? Did you just wake up?”

“It’s been a few…” He struggles for the word. “Cycles. It’s been a few cycles since I woke up.”

“It feels like _forever_ since I last saw you. Did Poe fill you in on all the Jedi stuff?"

"Kind of," Finn says. "You're the last Jedi, going to find the other last Jedi?" 

Rey laughs. Even with the video delay and the poor resolution of her cam, she's beautiful. Finn is fascinated with her face. He hears the machine humming next to him speed up and realizes, mortified, that everyone in the room has proof his heart is pounding. He hears Poe giggle. 

"Yeah, something like that. I actually called for the General, to tell her....well. I found her brother." 

General Organa's eyebrows shoot up to meet her hairline. "Luke? You found Luke?" 

"Yes, ma'am. He's asleep right now. He doesn't want to come back with me." 

"Why?" Poe asks, speaking for the first time since the call started. 

"Oh, hello, Poe! Um, he...says he doesn't want to risk ruining another Jedi. He won't train me."

The General sets her jaw with an audible click that makes Finn look up. Now she looks like the clips the First Order shows. "Wake him up," she says, and her voice sounds like it could penetrate the hull of a TIE fighter. "I need to talk to him." 

"Right now? Like, you want me to go get him? It's the middle of the night here, I don't know if that's wise--" 

"Wake him," General Organa says. "I'll be delighted to talk to my brother again." 

Rey nods and backs away from the screen, disappearing through a door  somewhere behind her. 

"Won't train her," General Organa says while they wait. "Unbelievable." 

Finn wants to ask why Luke-- the last Jedi, he guesses-- won't train Rey, but he thinks the General might hit him if he tries it.

Rey comes back alone. "He....wants to prepare to speak to you. Can he call you in a few hours?" 

The General, still visibly annoyed, huffs a sigh. "Very well."

"Thank you, ma'am. My video connection is about to cut off. The holo hasn't charged today and long distance transmissions are kind of shaky." Rey waves into the camera. "I'll talk to you soon, Finn! I'm glad you're awake. See you, Poe." 

Poe flips her a salute. Finn smiles awkwardly and waves goodbye. The transmission cuts off. General Organa takes the holoplayer back and tucks it into a pocket of her robe. 

"Can Finn and I talk to her again next week?" Poe asks, flashing a smile. 

General Organa visibly relaxes in response to the smile, her shoulders dropping a fraction of a centimeter and her wrists relaxing at her sides. She pauses and considers. "I suppose now that Finn is awake, we should set up some means of communication for him-- and for you, Poe. Perhaps you could borrow Pava's holoplayer?"

Poe quirks an eyebrow at the mention of this Pava person. His face is so expressive. Finn has no idea how to translate it into intention. "Jess is attached to her holonovelas, but I'll ask her. Or-- ma'am, I know this is an odd request, but would you mind if I went off planet? With a few power converters and a lens I could Zabrak-rig my holo to take calls."

"We'll talk about that later. A supply mission is in order, but I had planned to send a team rather than a lone man."

"I'm just going to pick up some power converters--" 

General Organa raises one hand and Poe stops talking. "As I said, we will discuss it some other time."

Finn is incredibly uncomfortable. He tries to make himself as still as possible, hoping neither side of the argument will notice him. Direct confrontation always leads to violence. This cannot end well. 

To his surprise, instead of raising a hand to strike her, Poe nods. "Yes, ma'am." 

The General nods to Finn. "I'm glad you are well," she says. He isn't, but he's still afraid of her. She marches out of the room. 

"You OK, buddy?" Poe is looking right at him again. "You look kind of tense." 

"Huh?" Finn tries to guard his body language, to bring himself back to neutral. 

"You're frowning," Poe points out. Finn blinks. He's not used to having to guard his facial expression. 

"Back pain," Finn lies. He still feels like someone is about to slap him. "I'm fine, really." 

"You totally have a thing for Rey, huh?" Poe's grin takes up half his face. Finn would be grateful for the subject change if it had been anything but this. 

"Uh. Yeah," he says, because he doesn't know if he can really hide it. His face feels hot. "She's...you know. Rey." 

"She is that," Poe says. He sounds like he's holding in a laugh. "Bet you can't wait to see her again." 

"No, I can't," Finn says, because there's no point in lying about it. "Is it next Benduday yet?" 

Poe doesn't hold in the laugh this time. "Oh, loverboy, you're adorable. Tell her how you feel next week. I'll get my holo working by then so you don't have to have the General in the room." 

"She didn't want you to go, though," Finn reminds him. "She looked like she was going to hit you!" 

Poe's arms tense in surprise. "She'd never hit me! We're friends, she's my General." He pauses. Finn can almost hear him thinking. "Buddy...did your generals hit you?"

"I'm tired," Finn says. He doesn't want to talk about Hux or Phasma, not now. The base of his skull is throbbing with memories of punishment. 

"I'll let you be, then," Poe says. He looks sadly at Finn for a second, then flashes a subdued smile. "See you soon, buddy." He leaves the room, closing the door gently behind him. 

Let him be. It's a strange expression. Finn doesn't know how to "be". He doesn't know what to do without a directive. Aimlessness doesn't suit him. Being doesn't suit him. 

Still, there's Rey. She isn't a directive, but he could "be" if he were around her. He hopes she comes back soon. He thinks she might be the only thing keeping him going right now.   
\------------------------------------  
After what feels like an eon of careful supervision and endless bowls of broth and gruel, they take the tubes out of his nose. The doctors promise he can leave the medbay soon, soon, soon. They let him scrub himself rather than sponging him down once daily. It's easier this way. Finn can't stand to be touched.  The doctor with the scales, who says her name is Shaela, tells him they have to put him through something called physical therapy. 

Physical therapy, as she calls it, is the painful stretching of his limbs. He hates it, but it doesn't appear to be intentional torture, so he endures it and understands that this will help.

They ease him slowly off the bacta. He discovers that his body hurts a lot more than he thought it would.

This, too, is proof that he is alive. The dead don't feel any pain. He grits his teeth and bears it, even though everything in his body is begging for more bacta. The IV drip isn't enough.

They take the IV out.

He stares at the puncture wound in his arm and tries to come up with a reason they should give him more. The other doctor, Javy, has a pattern of black diamonds down her arms. She tells him about the dangers of bacta dependence.

He doesn't care if he's dependent on the stuff. He shouldn't even be alive. A life of dependence is better than no life at all. 

Still, it gets easier to think. He remembers more.   
\-------------------------------------  
Rey calls him once on the General's holoplayer and three times on Poe's. They talk about everything and nothing at all. It's a little awkward at first-- Finn has a hard time covering over his adoration and Rey seems to be generally bad at holding a conversation. They get used to each other. 

Finn doesn't tell her how he feels. He's afraid she won't call him back. He misses her all week until she calls him. 

"I don't know what the General said to Master Skywalker, but he agreed to train me," Rey says. She appears to be sitting at the peak of a mountain, her hair whipping back and forth. Her staff is leaned against an outcropping of rock beside her. 

"Do you like it?" Finn has been reading archival documents on Poe's holo. He's read half the history of the Mandalorian Wars and a lot of recent history. "You know there used to be so many Sith Lords? The last ones were Darth Sidious, who controlled the last big Empire as Emperor Palpatine, and Darth Vader, both dead. Vader killed Sidious and then--" 

"And then Master Skywalker killed Vader," Rey finishes for him. 

"Oh, you know that story? When I told Poe he said it was practically a children's story all over the galaxy, but I've never heard it." Finn does not mention that this is because the First Order has no children, only trainees and larvae. 

"I didn't hear it as a child," Rey says. Finn is kind of relieved not to be the only one. "I didn't have any parents to tell me." 

Silence stretches between them. 

"So how's training? Can you do all sorts of Jedi battle tricks?" Finn is getting better at changing the subject. 

"Nah," Rey says. "It's mostly meditating on, like, the balance of the universe."

"Sounds like a blast," Finn says. That's an expression he picked up from Poe-- he still doesn't understand why a blast is supposed to be a good thing. "Maybe I should try it, since I can't really do anything else." 

Rey shrugs. "I dunno, it's only useful if you want to, like, hear somebody else's heartbeat or something."

"I can already do that," Finn says offhandedly. 

"Really?" He can't really tell her body language through the holo, but she sounds surprised. "It took me weeks to do that!" 

"I've kind of always been able to," Finn says. "Guess I'm just a natural." 

Rey laughs. "I wish you could be a Jedi with me."

The heart monitor speeds up next to him. 

"Me too," Finn says. 

"Oh, check it out, I can levitate rocks now!" Rey, seemingly oblivious to how Finn feels right now, scrabbles on the ground for a pebble. She picks one up, then closes her eyes and takes her hand away. It stays in mid air in front of he camera, wobbling slightly, until she plops it down. 

When the transmission cuts off, Finn is smiling. The expression feels strange on his face.   
\-------------------------------------  
Doctors Shaela and Javy give  him a chair that rolls.

"Have you seen this apparatus before?" Dr. Shaela asks.

Finn shakes his head. That still kind of hurts, too. The First Order has no use for what Shaela calls a wheelchair. It seems to be a fairly simple device: press the button on the armrest and it rolls. Rotate the control stick to turn. It's not unlike the TIE fighters. He thinks he can get the hang of it. It's less the idea of it that confuses him and more the significance. Instead of decommissioning him-- which, deep down, he still believes they should-- they're giving him a mechanized movement device. He is being forced to live.

"Thank you," he says, and he means it.

"We still want to continue physical therapy exercises to try and improve your mobility," Dr Javy says, "but you don't need to be here all the time anymore." 

The time comes for him to leave. Poe agrees to be there. He brings Finn a shirt and a pair of pants, soft and loose. Shaela and Javy   
wriggle the clothes onto him, force the pants up his useless legs. Finn puts the shirt on himself, although lifting his arms over his head makes the scar on his back pull agonizingly tight. He wonders if he could pull it open, pour blood all over the medbay floor. He has to fight back these thoughts from time to time, has to push down his rational mind. 

No. He's being forced to live. He can move now. 

Shaela and Javy help him into the wheelchair, their strong arms under his body while he clings to their shoulders. Poe stands by and watches.

"Welcome to the world, buddy," Poe says. "Do you remember the base or do you want the tour?"

Finn wants the tour. He wants to see everything. He remembers the base relatively well, but he hasn’t seen sunshine in so long that he would take a tour of a desert just to feel it again.

"Show me around," he declares. He pressed down on the controller and tilts it forward. Poe walks beside him. They make their way out of medbay, and Finn doesn't have to fight his rational mind at all. He's so happy to be alive.

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out with me @blasterpistol on tumblr. As they said in my heyday, concrit always appreciated. I love comments!
> 
> Unfamiliar terms:  
> Z6 Batons are the lethal batons used by some Stormtroopers.
> 
> The Star Wars universe uses a calendar called "Galactic Standard"; every planet, of course, has one or more local time zones. 
> 
> To "Zabrak rig" something is to fix it up with whatever is lying around. The term comes affectionately from Knights of the Old Republic 2 and is in reference to Bao Dur. 
> 
> I would like to acknowledge the excellent fic "have you heard" for the story format and references to Schrodinger's Cat which I use here.


End file.
